Love’s a Stage Read online

  “I’m sure he is,” said Frances. “But it’s a long ride, and perhaps I would be more comfortable,” and safer, she added to herself, “on a gentle mare. I’ve never ridden on a stallion before . . .” If it were not for her fear of being alone with Landry in a coach, she would not have agreed to go on horseback.

  Landry interrupted to say that Castor was not a stallion.

  “I suppose you’ve named a mare Castor!” said Frances irritably, suspecting that she was being made fun of.

  Frances realized her rejoinder had been a mistake when Landry gave a gleeful whoop and said, “Frances, can’t you tell that horse is a gelding?” He began, with an odious grin, to delineate Castor’s difference from a stallion, and Frances could only make him hush by diverting him with her incompetent attempts to climb into the saddle.

  * * *

  The early part of the ride was little occupied with conversation. Landry was too preoccupied with a dreamy contemplation of the starlit landscape, and Frances was too busy trying to keep from falling off the horse.

  They took the best roads, pausing only at the tollhouses to ring awake the tollkeepers, who appeared in duffel coats pulled hastily over their nightshirts and rubbing the sleep from their eyes to collect the toll and raise the gate. Landry set a rapid pace, and for that she was grateful. Lush pasture, forest, and fields planted in oats fell back behind them. In the middle of a field under a sleeping birch tree was a mysterious lump with which the meager starlight played tricks; was it an old hay rick? Slumbering cattle? The rush of the wind, the motion of the horses, the hoofbeats, mingled with the smell of dirt and night dampness. Suddenly they came upon a herd of fallow deer grazing under the stars. A white doe bounded in front of them, causing Frances’ gelding to startle and rear, and only Landry’s quick reach at the bridle saved her from being thrown.

  The incident unsettled Frances, for it reminded her that what lay ahead in the swallowing dark could be such an unknown quantity.

  Landry brought her gelding back by his side and began to tease away her fears. Sobering from the fresh air, his lively mind began to form questions about her home county. He asked Frances if she’d been to the flint works mined in antiquity by Sussex men chipping at the stone with their antler picks; had she ever, when a child, hunted in the hills for arrowheads manufactured in medieval times? Question and answer turned into discourse, and the dark became warm and intimate. Frances began to forget her ill-considered promise, the ache in her lower back that had earlier seemed to be growing with the passing moments, and the raw places under the heavy skirt where the leather had begun to bite into her skin. They were still far inland when the first nip of sea salt in the air gave her a jolt of homesickness.

  The roads, as they neared the coast, changed from passable to poor; adequate avenues changing into miserable ruts crowded by a press of vegetation. Landry’s questions seemed to focus with the narrowing of the roads. He asked her about Beachy Hill; how many people? How near the sea? Did she remember any particular terrain details, and did she know the size of the port? It was far into the questioning when Frances realized that, while he wore the mantle of an interested tourist, he was gently plumbing her to clarify the logistics of the coming adventure.

  The roaring of the surf was the called greeting of the Sussex coastline, welcoming Frances home. The song grew stronger as they climbed a long slope; reaching the top, they saw Beachy Hill growing up the seaward slant toward them. It wasn’t much of a village. Regional guidebooks were likely to dismiss it with the phrase “Visitors will find little to interest them here.” Local advocates could tell one, however, that Beachy Hill had been privileged to exist as far back as the Domesday Book, where it was listed as a “hythe,” or landing place. If, since then, the small sheltered harbor had become choked with sand, the fishermen would tell you that they didn’t care to have big navy ships stopping there anyway, and it was plenty deep for the shallow port’s picturesque fleet of yawls. And whatever was said about the famous “Whitstable Natives” farther down the coast, Beachy Hill was secure in the superior quality of their own oysters.

  Rushlights illuminated the steep dirt paths between the huddled slab-roofed houses. A warm smile decorated Frances’ face as she looked lovingly at the old-fashioned rambling outline of the parsonage. She saw the tiny figure of cross old Claudius, the goat Joe had trained to pull the children in a red-painted cart. Claudius was tethered in the middle of a circle of close-cropped grass. On a lumpy plateau next to the parsonage stood St. Andrews, her father’s church. The dark disguised all things, but Frances knew that the low bump bordering the church steps was the holy-water stoup, and to the back lay the desolate churchyard, with its share of old sea-salt encrusted iron crosses marking the graves of shepherds buried with tufts of wool in their hands to show at the Gates of Heaven as explanation for their lack of church attendance. There were no mysteries here for Frances. She knew that behind the blacksmith’s shop lay a slope, where deep puddles would collect every time it rained; she knew the rocky crevices near the landing where the water pipits nested. She knew which piece of Roman tile built into the church wall was loose—generations of sweethearts had used it to hide love tokens. Yet in the spare and brooding starlight, shivering under the ocean’s ceaseless roar, Beachy Hill looked as isolated and lawless as a pirate’s den. The rushlight’s glow seemed like the phosphorescent sheen of wolf’s eyes on a forest fringe. It was an odd fancy, Frances thought, and unlike her. She knew it would end if she could go into her home and experience the warmth and security she had always known there. But there was no time for that now. Delayed cognizance made her aware that Landry had made a remark, received no answer, and was patiently repeating his words.

  “How old is the church?” he was saying.

  “The foundation dates from 936 A.D., the year after the miracle.”

  “I don’t think I’m familiar with the miracle of 935.”

  “It wasn’t spectacular,” Frances admitted with a smile. “One morning four white oxen appeared on the village green, and as people watched, they turned rump to rump, in the shape of a cross. The villagers were so awed that they fell to their knees and vowed to build a church on that very spot.”

  “Very proper!”

  “I expect our ancestors had a rather different frame of mind, before the development of scientific inquiry,” explained Frances, noting Landry’s grin. “Of course, there were some who thought it was a take-in. Rumor has persisted to this day that’twas a trick—that the local abbott hired trained oxen from a band of traveling mummers. He owned the local inn, and there was a feeling that he wished to increase pilgrimage to the area.”

  “The true believers won the day?”

  “Yes, because later the same year there was a second miracle! The village was attacked by Danish pirates, and among their plunder was the treble bell from the old church tower. As they sailed away, the abbott came from behind the cider press, where he had been hiding, and rang the remaining bell to sound ‘all clear’ to the villagers, who had fled to the hills.”

  “A courageous group!” noted Landry.

  “I suppose they do sound a craven lot, but every excuse must be made for them,” she said fair-mindedly. “Whatever one may say about the Danes now, they were a very fierce group then. Though on that occasion, they came to a melancholy, if richly deserved, end. As the abbott’s bell began to toll, the treble bell on the pirate’s boat miraculously joined its fellow, rocking and swaying with such violence that it caused the boat to capsize. All aboard were lost.”

  “So,” Landry pointed out with a critic’s fine eye, “were Beachy Hill’s stolen possessions.”

  “There’s the rub,” admitted Frances. “My brother Charles always said it was a very good lesson that nothing in life is perfect, not even miracles.”

  “And does the abbott’s ghost still walk?”

  “Yes, of course! Many have seen his cowled shade stalking dolefully along the beach, accompanied by the sound of the treble bel
l chiming from somewhere far away in the night air. It’s taken to be the worst of bad omens.” She felt an internal tremor as she spoke, which was odd, because the story had never bothered her before.

  * * *

  Massive and pale, the chalk cliff rose like a gloomy phantom above the horseshoe ribbon of beach. As smugglers’ landings went, it was superior. Rocks enclosed the cove from the cliff base to the tiny bay’s narrow entrance; and the high jut of the cliff head concealed activities at its foot just as the belly of a fat man makes it difficult for him to see his toes. Like every well-planned foxhole, it had two exits. One was a track big enough for a two-wheeled cart cut deep into the rock by someone long forgotten. The other was a rocky, tortuous trail that edged between poorly balanced boulders and the dangerously eroded facing. It was down this path that Frances came with Lord Landry. They dared not risk a lantern. She had hitched the long riding-skirt ankle-high the better to negotiate the steep, crumbling trail. The horses had been left above, tethered to a wind-burned oak. Frances slipped once, when her heel hit a slippery hillock of thyme. Landry caught her at the waist before she could fall, and pressed a kiss on her lips as the fresh scent of the broken herb wafted around them, suspended in the sheltered air. She moved awkwardly and was instantly released.

  As they moved lower, the smell of fish and dried seaweed grew stronger, and the echo of the surf boomed against the cliffside. Dropwort grew, stinking and poisonous, on the final shelf of rock; it was as though they were descending into a vast pit. At last the ground leveled, and after a wade through a scratching strip of mallow, they stood upon the beach.

  Landry wandered to the water’s edge, scooped up a handful of stones from the lip of the sea, selected a plate-shaped one, and sent it skipping into the water. After it hit and became wet, Frances could see it reflecting starlight as the stone bounced four times before becoming lost.

  “What now, my dear?” he said.

  Annoyed by his day-excursion attitude, Frances said, “I’m not your ‘dear’!”

  “Dearer than you think,” he said, and smiled. Then, taking pity on her confusion, he said, “Are we going to cover each other with sand and pop up like sea monsters when the smugglers come? The dramatic possibilities are certainly intriguing.”

  Frances replied in a tone even she recognized as uncharitable, “I might have known that your greatest concern would be the dramatic possibilities. Very likely we’d find the boats dragged on top of us; though I suppose it wouldn’t matter, because we’d surely have smothered—” She stopped, responding to his motion for silence. Trying to block out the noise of the wind and the surf, she heard, after a moment, the rhythmic slap of oars cutting into water as the smugglers’ craft stealthily crawled toward shore.

  Landry caught her arm and pointed toward the cliff base. “The humped rock, Frances—will it do?”

  Frances nodded, and then ran beside him toward the sheltering bulk. No sooner had they hidden when the bobbing glimmer of a lantern began to move slowly down the cliffside.

  “The Blue Specter!” Frances breathed in a hushed whisper. “The flame is covered with a blue globe.”

  “And when they arrive, you wish me to subdue them with fisticuffs?” whispered Lord Landry.

  Frances frowned, managing to look austere and adorably doubtful at the same time. “We shall contrive something.”

  “Another Beachy Hill miracle?” he whispered. “We catch Kennan, but he shoots us?”

  Frances was too ashamed to admit that she hadn’t considered that Kennan might be armed. She stalled by saying, “Have you an idea?”

  “Send for Jem Beamer.”

  “There isn’t time,” she said sweetly.

  He clicked his tongue with mock regret. “If you’re going to raise quibbling objections like that, it’s going to be very hard to agree on a course of action.”

  “You,” said Frances with resignation, “are incorrigible.” She had reason enough to be afraid; rather, to her surprise, she felt a vivid and far from unpleasant exhilaration course through her. In the strangest of circumstances, Landry’s presence could do that to her, in spite of his flippancy and all the things she knew he was that ought not to please a parson’s daughter, and in spite of that dreadful promise that she could only pray he had been too drunk to remember.

  Far out on the water, the oars ceased their creaking, and a beam of light shot out and was quenched as a bull’s-eye lantern was flashed. Kennan answered by covering his own lantern with a cloth, then letting the cloth fall away. The oars began creaking again, and before too long the boat was close in, a long, low shape in the water. There were three men in it. Frances and Lord Landry could smell strong tobacco and hear the wooden scrape of sand on the bottom as one of the sailors stepped into the water and guided the craft to shore. There was some splashing and hollow knocking and a muttered oath, then the three men grouped by their beached rowboat. Their emphatic, serious words carried over the sand, and Frances recognized the gruff voice of the village blacksmith, Henry Johnson.

  “I ain’t sayin’ I’m scared—I ain’t sayin’ that at all. But I don’t know. I jest don’t know,” said Henry.

  “Tell us again, then. What was it exactly was said?” Frances carefully peeked over the hump of the rock long enough to recognize the skinny, high-strung figure of Jonathan Green, a local ne’er-do-well tenant farmer. Landry’s hand pulled her down with some force.

  “Ain’t nothing to add—nothing. Like I told you, when Miss Pam, the parson’s gel, came by my missus this morning to get her eggs, she said right out that she’d seen it walk last night.” Johnson’s voice, which had begun the sentence with its usual harsh bravado, had developed a distinct tremor at the end.

  “It?” said the third man, Peter Willis, who gardened for the Squire. “The monk?”

  “Aye,” said Johnson, his voice lowering two octaves, nearly dropping from the bass clef. “The undead. The old abbott! Miss Pam saw it on her way home from the Squire’s. Peered out of the shadows, it did, and beckoned to her. Then it turned round and with one bony finger pointed straight at my cottage!” The night seemed to turn blacker, and the waves more alive. Frances shivered in their hideaway and drew closer to Landry. “She thought it was a trick by one of the lads, did little Miss Pam, so she run right up to it. Crazed with courage, every one of that Atherton brood—she put her hand on the cowl and yanks it back!” His two companions exclaimed at the foolhardiness of Miss Pam. “But there weren’t no head there! Weren’t nothing but a wisp of green vapor! Well, she turned and ran fast as you please back to the parsonage, and didn’t come out’til this morning’s light.”

  A blue glow spread over the top of the rock over Frances’ head as the Blue Specter joined the three.

  “What’s going on? Where’s the rest of you?” Frances’ apprenticeship in the theater had sharpened her ears. She recognized Kennan’s voice even through his uncannily skilled attempt to disguise it, speaking in crisper than his normal tones. At his sharply spoken question, the Sussex men united in a wall of resistance.

  “Wouldn’t come,” said Johnson.

  “Why not?” Kennan’s voice purred menace through the muffling shield of his mask. The men of Sussex were silent. “Well?” he demanded threateningly. The men shifted their feet uncomfortably on the gritty pebbles.

  “The monk was walkin’. Ain’t nobody comes out when the monk’s walkin’,” said Green.

  “There’s some,” intoned Johnson in a hoarse whisper, “that say it’s a judgment on us—that the abbott’s spirit has come to curse the men of Beachy Hill for keeping their tongues quiet when the Blue Specter brought in thugs from Eastbourne to hide contraband in the church.”

  “Shut your mouth, you fool,” hissed Kennan furiously. “By God, you lot are alike the world over. Peasants and ghost stories! Whenever was there the one without the other? Have you no more brains among you than a baboon? Some lying jackanapes sees a shadow and you scurry underneath your beds.”

  Pete Willi
s’ distant shy devotion to Frances’ pretty sister Pam predated his first pair of short pants, so Frances was not surprised when he cried, “Weren’t no jackanapes, either, what saw it!’Twas . . .” His sentence was cut by a fist striking flesh, and there was a soft thud as Willis hit the ground. Frances peered over the rock to see Willis, sitting dazed on the sand, Johnson bending over him. Jonathan Green stared at the Blue Specter with hate in his eyes.

  “The fist is the only lesson you miserable wretches can understand! If you’ve come alone, you’ll have to make the trip to Calais alone.” Kennan knew well how to instill horror in his audience. His words carried the binding, horrific ring of a satanic pact. “On your return, tell the others to be back here next month or it will be the worse for them—and their families.”

  “Three men ain’t enough to unload brandy quick as we might need,” whined Green.

  “Forget the brandy,” Kennan ordered. “There’s only one thing I want you to take.” There was a sound of cloth drawing across cloth. “Do as you did the times before—you’ll be met at dockside in Calais by the man calling himself Jean-Luc. Give him the parcel, and he will give you the envelope with the money. It’s been arranged, and you’ll be paid your usual sum . . . what the devil?”

  His words died in a warm breeze that came across the waters from the open sea, a breeze that brought with it the high and bitter cry of metal striking metal, the peal of an ancient treble bell. Frances clutched at the rock for support as the world of nightmares, tales, and reality began to merge.